31_days | [SEPT 25] [ORIGINAL] BURIED WATER

Title: Buried Water
Day/Theme: September 25: ‘a gentleman can have it all’
Series: Original
Rating/Warnings: PG.

Thomas Prender drove his Audi A6 down the curving road with the seat-heating turned up high against the early autumn chill. A flurry of browning beech leaves caught and lifted in the air ahead of him, the trees above and below him still mostly green, shot through with the low evening light. The church spire rose up from the base of the valley, the light catching the weathercock as it had done when he was a boy coming home from school. Six o’clock. Mrs Weston, tweed skirt and gumboots, waited with her collie Tuppence by the side of the road as he drove past; they both raised a hand. In the rear view mirror, she stepped down from the verge, moved off behind the dangling paper pine tree which filled the car with the smell of fairytale forests.

Thomas shifted gears, swung the car one-handed round across the low stone bridge over the mill race, past the first of the houses, their yellow sandstone rough and grainy in the evening light as home-made fudge. He had come this way with Miriam in a Porsche 944s in Guards Red, her blonde hair whipping round her face in the breeze from the window, her hand over his on the gearstick. That first time, he hadn’t even known her last name. They had driven back this way, twenty-five years gone, in a hired Bentley, white wedding ribbons rippling on the bonnet, the churchyard behind them silted with pastel confetti. They had spun out and back to the village, long green country lanes with grey London offices at the end of them, late-night and early mornings spent droning down the motorway, the city-worker’s pilgrimage, again and again, until they had spun down into the valley for good, rooting themselves like a spider’s nest in the corner of a window, a tight white cocoon of eggs that stays there right through till spring.

Miriam had insisted they keep his family house, the old mill, built over the wide dark rushing water that came down the valley in a clear brown tilt through reddish stone, under tall beeches and hanging holly bushes. At this time of year, it carried leaves like old coins, gold and misshapen in the roiling water. They washed up against the old mill wheel, down under the house, in great clotted lumps, a mass of slimy wet leaf-mulch and water-worn crisp packets, old condoms like the skins of giant larvae. It had always been his job to go down, stand on the walkway, prod at the blockages with an old curtain pole. He had got quite good at it; practice, he sometimes thought, for the world of finance. Miriam, leaning down, laughing, had told him he looked like St George with a spear.

When he was young he had left a row of mice and birds down there, hanging in the water like washing from a string. Looking at his life since, the rows of office windows and the stamp of the divorce papers, it felt like a promise and a culmination.